It’s time we put humanity back on the corporate map
This was my core purpose when I started Barrett Consulting Group on 9th January 1995, and it still is today, 28 years later.
Prior to starting Barrett, I’d been in corporate for 11 years, giving my best, but feeling out of sorts, unsure about the purpose of business and sales. Something didn’t feel right.
I could see back in the late 1980s and early 1990s that business priorities were dramatically shifting:
- People were being reduced to consumers with an overemphasis on profit maximisation, shareholder return, and reductionism at the expense of holistic systems, humans, and the environment
- Race-to-the-bottom pricing and predatory deals began to dominate doing away with ethics, healthy relationships, and environmental care; moral disengagement was becoming the norm in big business and politics; the moral compass was disappearing
- The rise of individualism and celebrity CEOs at the cost of collaboration, diversity, and ‘we’ cultures was taking over
It seemed to me that care for humans, societies, and the environment was fading from the core of business. It’s why I chose to dedicate my career to putting humanity back on the corporate map because I could see the prevailing win-at-all-costs paradigm was highly divisive and destructive, and not inclusive and mutually prosperous.
I started with Sales because everybody lives by selling something and selling is all about human-to-human relationships. I specifically focused on human-centred sales practices that are all about collaboration because selling is a vital set of life skills and capabilities that allows opportunity to flourish and people to prosper. It’s why I founded a consulting and education firm that focused on Selling Better not just selling more.
Over the next 28 years I became a pioneer and embarked on what became my unofficial PhD into sales systems. Early on I discovered that sales systems are human systems of relationships and that learning is longitudinal -an ever-evolving process- so I also became a creator, behaviouralist, systems engineer, philosopher, an enabler.
Today
My team and I have achieved a great deal over the years through busting outdated sales myths and unravelling the skills, knowledge, and mindsets that make for highly effective sales and sales leadership using human-centred selling systems, practices, processes, and strategies.
Back in 1995 our approach was not mainstream that’s for sure, however, things are moving in a new and better direction. Over this time my intuition and subsequent research have been validated over and over again as more and more people today want more human-centred, respectful, productive, ethical, and collaborative ways of selling and doing business.
Over the last several years, especially the last two years, we have seen more and more people and businesses including their clients and suppliers, adopting a human-centred sales approach and ethos, and benefitting from our human-centred Selling Better Systems, Processes, and Strategies.
Lots of sales success stories come in weekly from those we train and coach in this space. People are so happy to be able to engage with their clients in much more meaningful, human-centred, and collaborative ways AND achieve great sales results.
We see wholesale business and sales team transformations taking place too, like this Case Study: Selling Better under extreme conditions with great financial AND human outcomes. This work even won our client a National Indian Business Award in Sales Excellence in 2022.
We’ve also seen community groups flourish and benefit from human-centred strategies, including my work as one of the founding organisers of March4Justice and Voices of Goldstein and as Zoe Daniel’s campaign manager for 2022 federal election campaign in the seat of Goldstein.
It’s very gratifying to see my long-held purpose ‘putting humanity back on the corporate map’ getting real traction now.
Many business leaders have found that shifting to a systems oriented, customer–centric, human-centred way of selling and doing business has steered many businesses and their sales teams in the right direction.
Our purpose remains: We help people and businesses sell better faster now and for a sustainable future, by transforming every sales operation into an ethical, human-centred sales system and culture that respects people and nature.
Our 28 years taught us Selling is ubiquitous. It’s a complex, dynamic, variable human-centred system.
Selling transforms lives and careers and Selling Better leads organisations toward thriving communities, viable economies, and healthy environments.
Selling is everybody’s business, and everybody lives by selling something.
Being human-centred is the way to go. I’m glad I stuck to my purpose.
The Time is Now: Keep an eye open for our 2023 Sales Trends Report, Humans at the Centre which will be released next week. It’s packed with lots of stats, facts, and research that supports being human-centred for all the right reasons.
Remember, everybody lives by selling something.
Stories from the field
Thank you! I know I have already said this but I will say it again. It was a fantastic day. We walked away with some practical tools and ways of elevating our way of doing business, growing our sales and selling better! You were engaging, insightful and aligned the content and delivery to suit our team.
Looking forward to our follow up sessions.
I had a client meeting on Wednesday and applied the WWW and gained plenty of F’s!
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